Category Archives: Terrific Retail Insights

Be brave and take a gutsy and courageous stand to differentiate your business. In a recent post, Donald Cooper inspires and challenges you to do just that. Over to Donald: My father used to say, “If you don’t stand for something…you’ll fall for anything!” What do you ‘stand for’ that could differentiate your business, make…

Research has found a link between the layout of grocery stores and casinos and the impact of their design on our behaviour. Click on this 1 minute 40 second video clip from a Channel 9 Australia report earlier this year. Visual courtesy of Shutterstock

Wesfarmers can give you an exact figure. Rounded off it is apparently close to $2 billion Aussie dollars. That’s how much it has reportedly cost them to get out of the struggling Homebase home improvement business they bought in the UK just over two years ago. The Guardian newspaper reports that Homebase has been sold…

Here are three examples on how to present and demonstrate your products and one illustrating how not to do so. These are taken from our, ‘Retail Selling: The Complete Do-It-Yourself Training Programme’. They are from a module in Volume 2 on ‘Developing Confidence in Your Products’. Get your customers involved If it’s an item of…

“Is that all you’ve got?” is a question that can take the wind out the sales of many service providers and salespeople and seem offensive to others, particularly proud business owners. Frontline salespeople will often answer with “Yes” followed by silence or make some weak statement about having more at their other outlet on the…

I was discussing with a café owner the importance of ensuring that one slice is always removed before his staff place a cake in the display cabinet. He was aware of the difference this makes to orders of cake slices but hadn’t shared this tip with most of his staff. This isn’t something that can…

You can learn a lot from observing the pricing strategy of the big retailers, retail travel agents and others with consumable products. They are forever testing price points and assessing customer reaction. The psychology of this is fascinating. $4.99 does work better than $5.00. $9.95 or $9.99 will out pull $10.00 every time. $99 will…

After being away on business for a week prior to his wife’s birthday, Tom thought it would be nice to bring her a little gift. "How about some perfume?" he asked the sales assistant at the cosmetics counter. She showed him a bottle costing $50. "That's a bit much," said Tom, so she returned with…

Have you ever felt forced into discounting because your competitors have started a price war? Maybe there’s another way. Consider this wonderful example from Jeff Slutsky from his book, 'Streetfighter Marketing'. It’s an old one so I’ve adjusted the prices to suit. It’s about a men’s hairdressing salon. This men’s hairdressers had a good reputation,…

Planning and managing the customer experience is essential to the success of any event for individual organisations, for communities and also for towns and regions. As the saying goes, it isn’t easy to read the label from inside the jar. In the same way, it can be equally challenging to see the world through the…